David Hu

David Hu
Occupation	Software engineer, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CTO of Magic Hour

David Hu is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Magic Hour, a platform for AI-powered video and image generation. Magic Hour was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch.

Career

Prior to founding Magic Hour, Hu worked as a lead full-stack engineer at Skillz, where he was involved in full-stack application development, infrastructure as code, and building CI/CD pipelines. He has described his professional interests as spanning frontend, backend, and infrastructure work. Hu is also the creator and maintainer of the open-source npm package React Spinners, a set of loading components for React applications, which has accumulated over 28 million downloads.

Hu co-founded Magic Hour alongside Runbo Li. The company, based in San Francisco, develops a professional video creation tool that consolidates multiple AI video models into a single platform. Users can generate and edit video content through a variety of tools, including face-swap video, lip sync, image-to-video, text-to-video, talking photo, AI headshot generation, image upscaling, image editing, video-to-video transformation, and animation. The platform is designed to simplify the video creation process by allowing users to select templates and customize them rather than working directly with underlying AI models.

Magic Hour operates across several industry categories, including artificial intelligence, B2B, video, media, and the creator economy. According to the company's website, the platform has been used by over three million creators and more than two thousand teams, with clients including Meta Platforms. The product was recognized on Product Hunt, achieving the #1 Product of the Day designation.

Hu's technical stack includes Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes, Terraform, Node.js, React, TypeScript, and Python.

Note: David Hu the Magic Hour co-founder is not to be confused with David L. Hu, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor known for research on animal biomechanics, nor David Hu, the co-founder of International Investment Group (IIG) who was subject to SEC enforcement action.